102 
while the people waited. Finally one of the girls dreamed that a white man cam* 
to her and gave her two brooms, saying ‘ With one of these brooms you shall sweep 
away the snakes. With the other you shall sweep away the white people when they 
begin to oppress the Ojibwa.’ Then at last the United Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and 
Ottawa attacked the Iroquois and drove them from the land. Many of the Iroquois 
changed to snakes and were unable to change back again. That is why there are 
many rattlesnakes today on Snake island in Parry sound" (James Walker). 
The independent status of the Ojibwa bands, the feeble authority of 
their chiefs, and the scattered lives of the families prevented any con- 
scription of their entire man-power for the prosecution of a war. Unless 
directly menaced by an enemy, their raiding-parties consisted of volun- 
teers only. Yet desertion was probably rare, because the Indians believed 
that the man who volunteered his services and then withheld them lost 
the medicine power he had received in his adolescent vision and soon died. 
Two informants described a ceremony for eliminating unsuitable volun- 
teers. 
“ In the middle of a large wigwam, completely enclosed, the warriors erected a 
sweat-house covered with deer-skins, and placed inside it buckets of water and hot 
stones. They remained in the wigwam outside while their leader, seated within,, 
poured the water on the stones and filled the space with vapour. The door of the 
sweat-house was closed, and only a tiny round opening in the wall permitted com- 
munication with the wigwam without. Each warrior called up his medicine-power 
with a song and entered through this hole, when the vapour in the sweat-house puri- 
fied his soul and body. Those whose medicine-powers were too weak to give them 
entrance were rejected from the war-party" (Jonas King and Pegahmagabow). 
Before their departure the warriors held meetings to formulate plans, 
but, contrary to the custom of the United States Ojibwa, 1 they seem 
neither to have feasted nor danced, except when they partook ceremonially 
of horse-flesh (in earlier times dog-flesh) as a sign of their willingness to 
endure the full vicissitudes of war. Their wives supplied them with rations 
of dried and pounded meat sufficient to last four or five days, and the 
party set out, on foot or in canoes, to engage the enemy. Often the 
women and boys followed them at a safe distance to furnish them with 
fresh meat as soon as the fighting ended. In rare instances a woman 
obtained the leader’s consent to accompany them to the battlefield. She 
was then permitted to wear feathers in her hair, a privilege that women 
were denied on all other occasions. 
There were always one or more scouts, nedobine, in front of a war- 
party to guard against surprise. Warriors volunteered for this duty by 
smoking a pipe that the leader passed around among his followers, and 
preference was given to men who had powerful medicines — men who were 
thought to be able to change their souls into hawks, hummingbirds, and 
other creatures, and thereby spy out the enemy without attracting notice. 
The word animkwan meant a dog-scout, i.e., a scout who had assumed 
the form of a dog; and during the war of 1812, the Parry Islanders say, 
the United States soldiers shot all the crows they saw because many of 
them were the transformed souls of Ojibwa scouts. They add, further, 
that a reconnoitring party that encountered a strong body of the enemy 
could send back information by means of a transformed soul, for if the 
1 Densmore, F.: "Chippewa Customs"; Bur. of Am. Ethn., Bull. 86, p, 134. 
